Trier of Fact
by The Black Sluggard
Summary: Kevin's view of the events leading up to "Evidence to the Contrary". Prequel. Kevin/Jenny, pre-Ryan/Esposito.


"Signs of predation" was the phrase Lanie had used in her initial report. Those words had meant almost nothing to Kevin at the time, only that the savage bites adorning their corpse, which had occurred perimortem, were the most likely cause of death.

Using an attack dog as a murder weapon was far from unheard of, but the extent to which the animal had been allowed to mutilate the victim was fairly uncommon. Making it even more unusual was the emerging possibility that the crimes were serial in nature. Though the body they'd first been called out to investigate had initially seemed like an isolated occurrence, a closer look had revealed ten victims, total.

Many had been homeless men and women, believed to have fallen to feral dogs, or else been preyed upon by scavengers after succumbing to exposure. Apart from a brief, fruitless sweep for the animals responsible, their deaths had unfortunately never been looked at closely. The killings had also been scattered over the course of six months, further obscuring their connection. It was the woman whose death they were investigating that began to tie it all together. One other jogger known to frequent the same trail had turned up as a corpse the prior month, and another one had gone missing a week before that. The first, like their victim, had been stripped of his clothes and belongings.

And, like all the others, the body had been partially devoured.

While homeless in the area claimed only to have witnessed the activities of a lone animal, the theft pointed toward the presence of a human handler. Oddly, despite never having seen the dog in the presence of an owner, nearly all of their interviews seemed to point toward the same man. No one knew the man's real name, and none of the names used to identify him were remotely flattering.

"_It'll happen at night,_" one witness had warned them, which seemed perfectly logical, and "_The full moon if you really want to be sure._"

Which...hadn't so much.

Nevertheless, in setting up their surveillance they had heeded this advice. Kate and Castle had spent too much time interviewing homeless in that area for them to risk using Beckett as their bait. For too many reasons to name, Castle was out of the question. Kevin and Javier had finally wound up settling on rock-paper-scissors to decide between them. Which was how Kevin had wound up jogging the same trail four nights that week. They were just exiting autumn, and the nights were still cool, but the protective padding he wore under his track suit had made running the route hellish. They could have switched off—Javier had offered after the first night—but even Kevin had to agree they had greater credibility if they remained consistent.

Needless to say, the case would not go down as one of his favorites.

That had been true _before _their trap was sprung, but by its conclusion it was even more so, because their precautions had proven utterly useless in the end. Well, that wasn't precisely fair. Though they had lost track of the dog during the take-down of their suspect, one of the EMTs had speculated the animal might have torn most of the flesh from Kevin's arm with its bite if he hadn't been wearing that protection. Still, it was hard for Kevin to feel good about it when he was being wrapped up in gauze. He would definitely need stitches.

And their suspect was on a slab instead of in cuffs.

None of them were very happy about that, least of all Beckett, and whether she meant to or not Kevin knew they would all be feeling the shocks of it long after the case itself had been laid to rest. Not that the death had been particularly tragic, or even probably unnecessary. It had simply been...confusing. In their confrontation with their killer things had become jumbled. Kevin blamed the adrenaline for the way details ran together and fragmented in his mind. A growl and Javier's shout of warning, pain, a gunshot and a yelp and the flash of eyes reflecting in the darkness.

Kevin knew that after Beckett fired the animal had released its grip and run off, leaving him bleeding where he was in the dirt on the jogging path. He knew that Kate had run after the dog as it retreated into the woods, and that once Javier gotten him on his feet again they both had followed. And following hadn't been difficult. The animal had clearly been wounded badly, leaving a clear trail of blood through the brush.

Only, when the trail had ended, it hadn't been the dog that they had found.

None of them had seen the man during the attack, but everything had happened so fast that they had to admit it was _possible_ he had been there. It was even probable that he had been nearby to order the dog's actions. The best they could figure out, the suspect must have been close by—close enough that one of Kate's shots at the dog had found an unintended target. Not that Kate was _satisfied _with that explanation, mind. Still, regardless of their displeasure over the resolution of the case, at the very least they were almost certain they had the right man. The suspect had set up camp in a remote area of the park, and had apparently been living their for several months. A search of his belongings turned up numerous items that could be traced back to the victims.

Additionally, the autopsy had turned up evidence of PCP in their suspect's blood, which while it didn't point toward _guilt_, at least suggested that his arrest could not have happened without a fight. While it didn't fully alleviate their doubts—and it had still bothered Kevin immensely that they never caught that damned dog—at the very least they had been willing to let the case rest.

And they had all thought that was the end of it.

The changes crept up on him slowly at first at first, and they were so subtle Kevin almost didn't realize he was changing at all. The aches in his joints and muscles were to be expected after his grapple with an estimated hundred pounds or so of aggressive dog, and the headaches and fatigue could be explained as a reaction to the tetanus shot he had been given after the attack. And neither symptom lasted very long.

It was the mental changes that really caught his notice.

At first he wrote them off as anxiety—or at least he had once the doctor finally convinced him of the supreme unlikelihood that it was rabies. The anxiety itself was part of it, though. As the days had passed after the close of their case, Kevin often felt overstimulated and jumpy. It never quite reached the point of panic, but he felt as if he were always on guard. And then there was the strange, growing sense of distortion to his perceptions. Sounds often seemed louder than they should have, smells and flavors more potent and distracting. When it began he simply felt somewhat unbalanced by it, but slowly details that he once might never have noticed became irritations, grating on nerves that only grew more raw as as the weeks went by.

Kevin had tried to ignore those details when he first began to notice them. Most of them were trivial things, really, small and meaningless. Nothing worth getting upset about, however annoying. Still, it was frustrating how little he could rely on his expectations anymore. And somehow, being reassured that there was nothing different about whatever it was that now bothered him—by Jenny, by Javier, by the vender on 8th who swore up and down it was the same mustard he always offered—never managed to be reassuring. Because what they were saying was that nothing was wrong, but it was painfully obvious that something _was _wrong.

That something was wrong with _him_.

And it must have been that mounting frustration that people first began to see. Jenny was growing concerned and a little frightened for him, and Javier had begun watching him with a wary sort of attentiveness. Less apparent was the way others with whom he was not as close had begun to keep their distance and seemed almost reluctant to approach him. As if, without even knowing him, it were still somehow obvious that something wasn't quite right.

One of the first things that really began to set Kevin off was the lying that wasn't lying. That was the only way he might have described it—though his experiences of it were so strange he never actually tried. Because it wouldn't have sounded sane, trying to explain the way people often said one thing with their words when their bodies and scents were saying another. The way Jenny told him things were going to be okay when she had begun to reek of nervousness and fear. The way the sergeant at the front desk tried to chat him up like they were buddies when the man's posture was stiff and awkward, and his lip curled briefly with disgust whenever Kevin saw him. The way Javier called him _bro_ and acted like his _friend_, when his proximity and the scent of his interest proclaimed something else entirely...

Kevin had made an effort not to trust these skewed perceptions too often. He rarely ever succeeded.

And it was frightening enough experiencing those shifts in his senses without worrying over the _other_part of it. The part where he found himself reacting to things in ways that didn't seem quite right. The uncharacteristic possessiveness he was beginning to feel around the people he cared about, and the alarming hostility that was beginning to develop around those he didn't know or trust.

Sometimes, Kevin felt like he was losing his mind.

And then there was that bizarre sense of something else. He wasn't quite sure what to call it. Not a voice—nothing so concrete or clear as that—more like a raw feeling of certainty. Though certain of _what_, he hadn't known from the start. It had been there almost from the beginning, a straining feeling that was almost indiscernible at first, but which had slowly grown into something almost like anticipation. A feeling that something loomed ahead of him, something that was unstoppable and important—something for which, without quite understanding, he somehow still found himself very eager.

And, painfully, that nameless tease only left him feeling that much more unstable.

Almost three weeks after the attack finally saw Kevin's agitation overflowing into something he couldn't restrain, driving Javier out of his space. In the week that followed, he had shocked himself by screaming at Jenny—over her _perfume_, of all stupid things—and, as he watched her break down in tears, Kevin could no longer fool himself that the fear she felt was simply on his behalf. She was afraid of _him_. And he loved her with all his heart, but she didn't deserve to live with that kind of fear. He was hurting her. He had never raised a hand, but he was hurting her all the same.

He had lost something. He didn't know how, or even what it was, but clearly he had lost something very important if he could do that to her. And though a hungry, possessive part of him raged bitterly against the idea, he knew at that moment that he had to let her go.

And that was when _he_ first began to fear. Because it was at that point he was forced to acknowledge that something truly frightening was happening to him, something that was slowly destroying everything he had—everything he _was—_and he had no idea how to stop it. It was a formless, shapeless fear, one for which he no name, no true sense of what it was…

Then, one night, Kevin had looked up at the swelling moon and felt that eager sense of anticipation rise up inside him. It was more powerful, more intense than it had ever been, and though the emotion that spilled through him it was wordless, examination had translated it easily enough.

_Soon_, it said, and with all the fierce intonation of a promise.

And, when the answer finally came to him, Kevin tried to push it away, because the thought that was scratching at the backdoor of his mind simply wasn't sane. Yet that scratching was loud and insistent, and seemed to resist being drowned out by either logic or stubborn refusal.

_Soon_, he had agreed, vowing to himself that he would finally break his silence. That he would finally seek _help_...

But the full moon had come, moonrise landing like a blow across his shoulders. A blow that had left him kneeling at his bedside as if in prayer. His fingers had tangled viciously in the sheets as he tried to fight the hot, dull ache of pressure slowly building inside his chest. Each ragged, panting breath had been a denial—the insistent mantra that it wasn't happening—that it wasn't _possible_—flowing mindlessly from his lips, but when the dam had finally broken, the noise that escaped his throat could never have been mistaken for human.

And, by the next morning, the nature of his fear had shifted entirely.

His memories were confusing and disjointed, but Kevin remembered every second of it, and the state of his bedclothes carried enough physical evidence to condemn him on its own. In the end, he was forced to accept one of two frightening possibilities. Either he had finally been driven completely over the edge, or—impossibly—what was happening to him was _real_.

Kevin honestly hadn't been sure which was worse.

He had dug out that month-old file, hoping to settle his doubts, and the true horror of his situation only made itself known during that wrenching second look. Now, when he scanned his notes, the accounts of their suspect's antipathy read like territoriality, and those photographs of his camp looked like a den.

And suddenly those same three words out of Lanie's report—_signs of predation_—had meant something else entirely.

The nausea had hit him painfully and suddenly, like a hammer to his stomach, and he barely made it to the restroom in time. The aftermath left him feeling sick and shaken, tears running helplessly down his face. It was nearly impossible for him to draw breath past the terror caught in his throat, and it was nearly twenty minutes before he could even pull himself up off the floor...

Because what those words had really meant was that the victims had been partially _eaten_. Knowing now what the killer had been—what _he himself _was becoming, or had already become—Kevin found himself terrified beyond any measure that he might somehow turn out the same.

A murderer. A cannibal. A _monster_.

Kevin had yet to hurt anyone, and he hoped he never would, but the changes were such that it was getting harder for him to feel like he even knew his own mind anymore. There was no blood on his hands—not _yet—_but it would be reckless for him to put any faith in the thought that he would stay that innocent forever. That he feared that end so much was perhaps the only thing that gave him any comfort, and he prayed to God that feeling would stay. He would build that fear a home in his soul, feed it every day—_live _with that terror every day for the rest of his life if it meant keeping the beast at bay.

And, if that fear ever began to slip from his grasp, if he ever felt the monster beginning to overcome him, Kevin could only hope he would have the strength to do what was necessary to destroy it.


End file.
